Shortly after the World War II, after the communists took power during the February coup, there was a mass arrest of people considered as enemies of the peoples' democratic system by the new regime in the then Czechoslovak Republic. From Slovakia, 27,000 persons were sentenced by the National Court to death or received life and long-term sentences during manipulated political trials in the years 1 948 - 1 952. More than 70,000 persons received sentences by other courts until 1989 and suffered in hard prisons and forced labour camps. The investigators often used torture and many died due to cruel treatment. The political prisoners spent their sentences in forced labour camps, like in the uranium mines of Jáchymov and Příbram, and prisons in Bohemia (Valdice, Mírov, Plzeň-Bory etc.). In Slovakia, Leopoldov and Ilava were the most notorious prisons. Nearly 200,000 people were sent to forced labour camps. More than 100,000 politically unreliable soldiers were assigned to the accessory technical corps. Almost 300 persons were executed and 15,726 persons died in prison.At the end of World War II, more than 20,000 persons from Slovakia were illegally deported to the Soviet gulags by the NKVD. The majority of them never returned. The memorial dedicated to the victims of the regime, which honours the contributions of these people to the fall of Communism, is put up at the National Assembly building.